MLB can’t move on from ‘steroids era’ with cases like Clemens’ festering

With the Capitol in the background, former Major League Baseball pitcher Roger Clemens arrives at federal court in Washington, Wednesday, July 6, 2011, for his trial on charges of lying to Congress in 2008 when he denied ever using performance-enhancing drugs during his 23-year career. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
— AP

With the Capitol in the background, former Major League Baseball pitcher Roger Clemens arrives at federal court in Washington, Wednesday, July 6, 2011, for his trial on charges of lying to Congress in 2008 when he denied ever using performance-enhancing drugs during his 23-year career. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
/ AP

What baseball needs is closure. What Roger Clemens provides is a can of worms the size of a grain silo.

The perjury prosecution of the seven-time Cy Young Award winner is still at the jury selection stage, but the list of potential witnesses is long on tainted luminaries and the legal strategies of both sides are likely to elicit a lot of embarrassing admissions.

Since Clemens is fighting for his freedom as well as his reputation, baseball is sure to sustain some collateral damage between the Rocket’s vigorous defense and the reading of the verdict. Much as it wants to distance itself from the steroids era, and to treat drug-enhanced performance as ancient history, sordid truths continue to seep out.

For instance:

“There isn’t a team in the last 20 years that has won clean,” six-time All-Star Curt Schilling asserted Wednesday on a Philadelphia radio station.

Since Schilling pitched on four World Series teams during that span — the 1993 Philadelphia Phillies, the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks and the 2004 and 2007 Boston Red Sox — his claim will be hard to contradict. That Schilling’s statement has created so little buzz and no apparent backlash suggests we’ve moved from denial through anger to acceptance on the Kubler-Ross grief continuum.

It suggests that baseball’s dirty steroids secret has been disclosed, discussed and largely dismissed as yesterday’s news.

But the sad truth is that the steroids story has the legs of a centipede and the curse of a Coleridge albatross. It has rendered the record book almost meaningless, turned the annual Hall of Fame election into a referendum on moral relativism, besmirched an entire generation of ballplayers and their complicit bosses, and produced perjury indictments against the game’s single-season and career home run leader, Barry Bonds, and his fireballing contemporary, Clemens.

Steroids is the baseball scandal that goes dormant but never really dies, resurfacing on a regular basis as sobering context for statistical achievement, as an implied asterisk, as presumed guilt, as an enduring blight that Padres CEO Jeff Moorad has characterized as “death by a thousand cuts.”

The Clemens case is particularly painful for baseball because his perjury charges arise from congressional testimony that was offered voluntarily and because his scorched-earth vindication strategy promises to add aspersions to baseball’s already battered reputation.

Among the more prominent names on the prosecution’s list of potential witnesses are Bonds, Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro and Sammy Sosa — the quintessential quintet of suspicious slugging — as well as several of Clemens’ former teammates and associates. Some of them may only rate a passing mention and be spared the discomfort of cross-examination, but none of them figure to be flattered by their inclusion in this case.

The case could turn on the testimony of retired pitcher Andy Pettitte, who has signed a sworn statement that Clemens admitted using Human Growth Hormone, prompting the Rocket’s curious claim that his pal had “misremembered” what he heard. It could turn on the credibility of Brian McNamee, the personal trainer who purports to have injected Clemens. And, as we’ve seen, it could turn on the composition and caprices of the jury.